On life:this is a telling,not a judgment

I.

I am at best compelled by it; it is at best contained. If it be mental illness, it is contained within this form; it is of physical occupation and can be examined by natural philosophy, but it transverses to the ethereal; it is of the will, which, too, can be mapped to the dorsal-lateral region of the prefrontal cortex, the intent mapped to a neuron separate from the follow-through, but where does value lie; where is the map of the soul, if it rests within this form, if it is contained within this body?

II.

It has been 10 years. A decade ago, my history teacher told me that we would never anticipate the arrival of our self-addressed letters; we would forget them entirely. I remembered just to spite her. In 10 billion years, the sun will swallow the earth as it nears the last stage of its life course, and I will remember it then.

III.

The opposition I felt, at the root of my self-righteousness, was of the belief that human life is fundamentally toxic, but that life as a whole is sacred. I view life under the dissecting lamp, but I believe in beauty, although I can never produce it because I cannot connect the will to the execution, because I have barely will enough to live. And I know now that whatever I am, however I believe, has never been abandoned. I am the same as always but know less of how to care.


IV.

The children I used to protect – whose eyes I would cover as I alone watched the dying gulls gasp their last breath – now, with derisive, gum-toothed grins, mock my promiscuity tempered by my moral inability to copulate, for they, too, are of the flesh and my flesh is weakened and controlled while theirs continues to expand.

V.

I have a board game of blank spaces and a die of equal probability and blank drawing cards and a blank rule book, or more precisely, a rule book printed in gibberish whose only intelligible phrase is: “These laws may yet be overridden; these laws are relative to the mind’s-eye of the reader and game-player.” And I know not what to do. I know not how to play, nor whether I would want to, nor whether I would enjoy my time spent creating from scratch what could turn out to be a knavish and puerile game with no mark of progress, no achievable goals, and an end of little logic or sense of accomplishment.


VI.

I do not, at all, know, in any definition of the term, what, if anything, to do.

VII.

Today my pen shows
I’m at best melancholy,
At worst, drowned at sea.


VIII.

We are the termite den communicating (in zeroes and ones, the chemicals the queen secretes) the most logical allocation of our resources. We are the same system from the solar to the atmospheric to the ecological, country, societal, individual, organ, cellular, atomic level. The same rules apply. The rules that have always and will always exist. We are the same system on every level, repeating (like our DNA base pairs that define species and the degree to which they are related) infinitely on every scale.

IX.

I am ignorant of God, but we are Him; we are recreating Babel to no avail, to no purpose, just to map the heavens and engineer our souls. There is no right nor wrong, only societal rule. There is no meaning. There is nothing, not even us.

X.


We cannot be created nor destroyed; We exchange; We are recycled to higher and lower energy levels, to more exclusive and encompassing systems; We depend on everything; We are everything; We cannot be contained.